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Enterprise 2.0: Social Bookmarking in the Corporate World

Posted on June 28, 2006 ·

connectbeamlogo.jpg(Updated)
If there is a clearcut example of how consumer-oriented social platforms penetrate the Enterprise market, then ConnectBeam it is: what started it’s life as CourseCafe, the “Other FaceBook” is now reborn as a Social Bookmarking Service for corporations.

I originally met Puneet Gupta, Founder and CEO at an SVASE Breakfast session and was impressed by his vision – so was the VC Partner, too, but back then Puneet was just testing the water, not ready to bring in serious VC investment. A few blog posts and a review by TechCrunch attracted a lot of interest, and Puneet started to receive serious feedback that there is a need for such a service in the corporate world, too. While I seriously believed in the future of the original student-community-type model, too, I have to agree with Puneet: a startup needs to be focused, and can not possibly build too separate businesses at the same time. That’s how ConnectBeam was born.

TechCrunch usually does a much better job in reviewing products than I do, so please read it over there.

Related posts:

Update (11/27): Robert Scoble interviewed Puneet.  Watch the interview here (Quicktime) and a product demo here.

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Social Networking, Startups ·
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HieroZlango? Zlanglyphs? :-)

Posted on June 28, 2006 ·

TechCrunch

profiled Zlango,

a cute icon-based SMS  ZMS language. Nice, who knows what the outcome will be:

  • It will not take off, since to really use it, the receiving end needs to have

    it on their phone, too.

  • Because of the above, it will spread virally

  • Since it’s so cute, it will spread among kids first, and the language

    separation will be final: we can give up any hope of understanding the 10-year

    olds ever again. 

Either way, as Ethan

points out, the idea is not quite new: Zlango = ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs + modern

technology.

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Filed Under: Humor, Personal Productivity, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Plaxo + Jajah = Nay, Nay!

Posted on June 28, 2006 ·

It’s that dreadful time again: moving all my files to another laptop. As much as I am a WebOffice advocate, I have not yet made a complete transition the way Ismael did: I still have way too much junk on my harddisk.

Every step of this painful process is yet another argument to move to WebOffice. For example, after moving my entire Outlook.pst file, why on earth do have to manually recreate all email accounts, fix the messed up in box rules..etc? What a joke!

But the real pain is Plaxo. No matter what they claim, every move is a potential data disaster. Plaxo will insist on duplicating your Contact, Calendar..etc data – the only variety is whether you get duplicates on your machine or in the online version. The only way to avoid this mess is to disconnect your Outlook data from Plaxo, then manually connect again – which is what I did, downloading the latest version of Plaxo in the process. What a surprise! I have these cute little phone icons in all my contact records. Could it be a direct link to Skype?

Ahh, no such luck, it’s a click-to-connect using Jajah. There’s a lot of buzz about Jajah today, as they announced free calls. It’s really free – sort of .. as long as both parties are Jajah users. Sorry, that does not cut it for me. Inexpensive calls to non-members? Thanks, but nothing beats free. I’ll be quite happy to use the Skype toolbar for my free calls. But I am really unhappy with the way Plaxo populated my Outlook with this Jajaj junk. Plaxo is free (well, they have a premium option, which I tried and found useless, and getting a refund took CEO intervention – but that’s another story), so it’s OK for them to try to push additional services. But there is a line, and in IMHO that line is drawn at going beyond their own product. I own my Outlook file, and Plaxo should at a minimum ask me before pushing a third-party plugin into my Outlook file. But of course I am not entirely surprised, considering Plaxo’s long history of “attitude problems“.

Update (6/28):  The Jajah buttons in Plaxo can be turned off via Plaxo > Preferences > Advanced > uncheck Show Click to Call Icons.  Of course this should be an option offered at the time of installation, not something I discover after digging around.

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Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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NASA’s Foamy Business

Posted on June 27, 2006 ·

A year old post of mine, titled Debris Falling from Discovery has been my most-read page ever. Another piece, Time to Dump the Shuttle also attracted a lot of readers:

“This is sickening… with all the billion$ spent on the Space program, we’re dealing with pieces of foam, tape, glue, pieces of junk protruding, falling off… are we talking about kids’s toy models or space-age design and materials here? As so many other’s stated, instead of band-aiding it, it’s time to dump the old Shuttle , and either build a brand new one, or leave space travel to the Russians … or perhaps Private Enterprise.”

I don’t want to write another “hit” article like this. Yet I can’t help but wonder reading this:

“The seven crew members of the space shuttle Discovery will arrive at Kennedy Space Center today to take one of the biggest risks of their lives. They have a 1-in-100 chance of dying during their spaceflight that begins Saturday.

Those, at least, are the official odds that NASA has given.

Michael Stamatelatos, who as director of safety and assurance requirements at NASA is the agency’s risk guru, said that number should be taken with a grain of salt, because NASA used to say the chances were 1 in 7,000 until Challenger proved that to be overly optimistic.

Two top officials at NASA took the unusual step of dissenting from the space agency’s decision to go ahead with the launch without fixing the potentially catastrophic problem of foam falling off the external fuel tank — the very problem that doomed Columbia 3 1/2 years ago.

The agency’s safety director and chief engineer wanted to wait and fix the problem. But NASA Administrator Michael Griffin decided a July 1 launch is worth the added risk for a variety of reasons.” (original story at CBS News, emphasis is mine)

I don’t know about you, but I think a 1:100 chance is really, really big. A “Business Decision” has been made, overwriting the Safety Director. This is as bad as it gets. I really don’t want to write another “sensational” post.

Update (7/4): Yet another crack in the foam is discovered … but NASA proceeds with the launch plans for today.

Related posts:

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Filed Under: Misc, Politics, Technology ·
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The (Microsoft) Empire Strikes Back

Posted on June 27, 2006 ·

ZDNet reports that Microsoft’s already aggressive Windows Genuine Advantage “might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” – and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.” Quote from a MS Customer Service rep:

“He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

The problem is that WGA is sneaky, installs without warning and breaks havoc on certain computers. It is also known to report perfectly legal installations as illegal. And now (actually from September) they can kill your Windows? What a mass. Too bad Robert Scoble is busy packing his house– he should shed some light on this.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Milestones …

Posted on June 23, 2006 ·

Digg v3 Party

Originally uploaded by Laughing Squid.



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Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Startups ·
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Where Would Web 2.0 Be Without AJAX? :-)

Posted on June 23, 2006 ·

Thanks to Espen Antonsen for pointing out the cornerstone of Web 2.0

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Filed Under: Humor ·
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Thanks, Comcast … for Everything

Posted on June 22, 2006 ·

This video made it to MSNBC yesterday night:

Watch the vid here should the embedded player not work.

Filed Under: Customer Service ·
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Zoho Office Suite is Now Complete

Posted on June 22, 2006 ·

(Updated)
What a timing! When I wrote about Zoho yesterday, two products I mentioned, Zoho Show and Drive were still in the “pipeline”, unannounced, I simply guessed the URL’s. Today Zoho Show has been released as a “public beta”, and with this move we now have the first Ajax-based Office 2.0 Suite:

When I say complete, I simply mean that we now have a web-based service for the main applications that make up part of MS Office – completeness by far does not imply that Zoho is done for now. In fact, here’s a partial list of their additional offerings: Zoho Creator is a quick and easy application generator, Zoho Planner is an organizer, Zoho Drive is online storage (yet to be released).

The company also has business applications like “Virtual Office” and Zoho CRM, and a few other utilities to be found at the main Zoho page.

Instead of repeating myself, here’s a quick reference to my two previous posts on the significance of the Zoho Suite:

There’s also a good summary at ZDNet: Zoho releases Ajax presentation app – last piece of Web Office jigsaw?

Update (6/24): TechCrunch profiles Zoho Show.

Update (6/27): Office 2.0 evangelist Ismael Ghalimi agrees: Zoho is Complete.

Update (6/28): I was one of the first to complain how slow the PPT import to Zoho process was, so I’m really happy to announce that the Zoho team fixed it.  Now you can jumpstart your presentation by quickly uploading an existing Powerpoint deck.   I really love the responsiveness Zoho has shown repeatedly.

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Software ·
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WetPaint, the Wiki-less Wiki

Posted on June 22, 2006 ·

Recently I wrote: “You Know Wikis Have Arrived When …. they become the feature post in your regular junk mail – this time from an Executive Recruiter firm:
What in the World is a “Wiki”? If you don’t know what a Wiki is, you probably should.”

Well, maybe you shouldn’t. Let me rephrase the original statement: Wikis have arrived when …you don’t even have to know what they are to use one. You don’t have to know you’re using a wiki, just happily type away, creating shareable content on the Web. This just became possible on Monday, with the launch of WetPaint, a hosted free service that combines the best of wikis, blogs, and forum software.

  • It’s like a wiki: you can create any number of pages, arrange them in a hierarchy, navigate through top-down in a tree fashion, or via direct links between pages. Anyone can edit any page a’la wiki (optionally pages can be locked, too). There is version control, audit track of changes and previous releases can be restored at a single click.
  • It’s like a discussion forum: you can have threaded/nested comments attached to each page
  • It’s like a blog: editable area in the middle, sidebars on both sides with tags and other info.

The launch created quite some interest: TechCrunch profiled Wetpaint, and several bloggers say it’s the best wiki platform ever. I respectfully disagree. There is no such thing as a “best wiki” – there are only “best” tools for specific purposes. Here are a few examples:

Confluence and Socialtext are both Enterprise Wiki’s , robust, well-supported, targeting corporate customers. Clearly not end-user products.
JotSpot is more geared towards smaller businesses and consumers and in fact it’s a mix of a wiki plus a few basic applications. I still had to watch the demo videos before getting started though.
Central Desktop is a “wiki without the wiki”, more of a full-featured collaboration platform with calendar, task, project ..etc features for small companies.

Yet I couldn’t have used any of the above platforms for setting up the Techdirt Greenhouse wiki, the online space supporting the recent successful “unconference”. Why? We needed the simplest possible site that’ so easy to use that anyone can get started without even a minute of training. WetPaint (in closed beta at the time) was simply the only choice:: easy-to-use, yet powerful, a platform that allows anyone to contribute to the website in minutes, without any training, or even reading help.

Forget wiki. WetPaint is a wiki-less wiki. It’s the most user-friendly self-publishing tool that allows anyone to create a site and transform it into an online community. Don’t take my word for it though: the proof is the 3000+ sites that were set up in the 3 days since the launch. That probably includes people who have not had a site before, and some who moved, like Mike:

“I’m moving from the current Wiki (based on Mediawiki which runs the beloved yet always under fire Wikipedia) to a new Wiki doo-fangle called Wetpaint. Why? Coz it’s a gazzilion times easier to use and I like it.” Well said.

Here’s what Yule says: “I just started a wiki – my first ever… Blame WetPaint – couldn’t resist starting this up.”

Check out samples of WetPaint sites, then it’s your turn to create your own… I will soon be launching mine.

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Software · Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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